https://www.ncci.com/Articles/documents/II_MondayClaims.pdf

The National Council on Compensation Insurance (NCCI) released a research brief that investigates the speculation that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) would have an impact on claims with Monday accident dates. There is a hypothesis that injuries that occurred over the weekend might be reported as a work-related injury even though they weren’t, and so Monday would have a greater percentage of those claims with non-work-related injuries than other days of the week. Some thought that the ACA would reduce the number of non-work-related claims that are paid by workers’ compensation and that the number of Monday accident date claims would decline, since more people had health insurance under the ACA and might rely on that instead of workers’ comp

The study looked at changes in the share of Monday claims before and after ACA implementation, and whether workers’ comp data supported this hypothesis that Monday claims declined because of ACA implementation and the increased amount of newly insured workers.

They found that the share of claims with Monday accident dates is slightly higher than claims with accident dates on other days of the week, though this was true before and after implementation. They also found no noticeable impact of the ACA on share of claims by day of the week, even when restricting the analysis to states with the largest decrease in uninsured populations after the ACA (more than a 6% decrease). They looked at lower back injuries since they represent a larger share of Monday claims than of all claims across all days of the week, but there was no meaningful change in the share of Monday claims for lower-back injuries. Overall the researchers determined that patterns of claim shares by day of the week are likely due to different industry work patterns and not due to the ACA.

The study looked at lost-time claims and medical-only claims from accident years 2012 to 2015, with the pre-ACA period running from January 1, 2012 to December 31, 2013 and the post-ACA period running from January 1, 2014 to December 31, 2015.

Read the full study here.